Literary Anagrams for Readers Who Love Wordplay

Fifteen anagrams built from author names and a few well-known literary names. Every scrambled phrase uses exactly the same letters as the answer — rearrange them all to find who’s hiding inside.

Unlike the scramble puzzle elsewhere on this site, these anagrams cross word boundaries: the letters of a two-word clue phrase might reshuffle into a name with a completely different word split. “I WANT MARK,” for instance, doesn’t keep “MARK” in the same place in the answer. Treat each clue phrase as one long string of letters rather than word-by-word, and the hint underneath each one narrows things down if you get stuck. A useful habit: count the vowels in the clue phrase before you start rearranging. Most English names keep a fairly predictable ratio of vowels to consonants, so a clue phrase with an unusual number of one or the other is a hint about the shape of the name you’re hunting for.

A note on the names

Several answers here are pen names rather than birth names: “MARK TWAIN,” “LEWIS CARROLL,” and “OSCAR WILDE” (Wilde used his own name, but the anagram works on the same principle) all show up in the one-line hints attached to each answer. If a name looks unfamiliar once revealed, the hint is there to connect it back to a book you already know.